Sunday, June 29, 2008

Swinging on the flippity-flop

(Updated on 6/29/08 with links to listen to this episode)

We saw Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! on Thursday night at the Paramount. It was really funny and interesting to see the mechanics of producing a "live" radio show. With Bill Gates' retirement from Microsoft happening this week, there were a large number of MS jokes, including about 15 minutes of riffing on the theme of Clippy!

"It looks like you're digging a shallow grave! Is this a business or personal grave?"

Their "not my job" guest was Jonathan Poneman, one of the founders of Sub Pop Records. That led to a discussion of the 1992 New York Times article on "grunge slang". See the article here, which includes a "lexicon of grunge speak" from Sub Pop employee (now VP) Megan Jasper - most of them were made up on the spot and are pretty obviously fake, but the NYT journalist took the bait and published them without checking... :)